Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump

by Duchess Harris

  Even though Moseley Braun managed to significantly narrow the gap between herself and Fitzgerald over the last few weeks of the campaign, she was ultimately unable to overcome the questions about her character that had persisted since her 1992 campaign, and she lost by four percentage points in the November 3 election, 47% to Fitzgerald’s 51%. The first Black woman ever elected to the Senate was about to join a sisterhood of Black women who could not survive the Democratic Party. She would not, however, be the last.

  Clinton’s Cabinet of Curiosities: Lani Guinier and Dr. Joycelyn Elders

  Carol Moseley Braun’s unsuccessful Senate term occurred during the Clinton era. Many Black women were hopeful about the possibilities for their own expanded involvement in the political arena in January 1993 with the inauguration of President Bill Clinton, his choice of Maya Angelou as his inaugural poet, and his attempt to put Blacks in his Presidential cabinet. Shortly after his inauguration, Clinton nominated his friend and former classmate Lani Guinier to the prestigious and crucial post of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Guinier’s nomination sparked an immediate firestorm of criticism from the right, which labeled Professor Guinier as the “Quota Queen ” and assailed her for ideas expressed in her publications, most of which her opponents had not read, or which they had taken out of context and misunderstood. In the face of this opposition—what one friend of Guinier’s called a “low-tech lynching”—Clinton backed down, not only withdrawing her nomination, but also refusing to afford Guinier the opportunity to speak out in her own defense (and, of course, his). The result was a civil rights setback of monumental proportions.

  Unfortunately, the Guinier embarrassment was followed by the scandal that engulfed Dr. Joycelyn Elders , nominated by Clinton in July of the same year, to be the Surgeon General. Elders was confirmed by the Senate with a vote of 65-34 as the nation’s 16th surgeon general. She succeeded Antonia Novello , the first woman to be named to the post, making her the second woman and the first Black to serve in this capacity. Elders was sworn in and just a little over a year later, on December 9, 1994, was asked to resign. Her brief tenure exemplifies Black women’s struggle to gain stature in the Democratic Party in general, but in William Jefferson Clinton’s cabinet in particular.

  In 1991, then presidential candidate Bill Clinton emphasized as one of his key campaign themes that he would “end welfare as we know it.”38 Five years later, with his fall reelection looming, President Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act , representing the most comprehensive, landmark welfare legislation since the New Deal . The bill, which had been strongly endorsed by Congressional Republicans, ended six decades of the government safety net that had served as the fundamental basis for social welfare programs. The legislation dismantled Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the program most associated with the welfare system , and created a new, more restrictive program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) . Many policy analysts believed that this was a “centrist” move on the part of President Clinton to ensure reelection. Passing this legislation helped solidify the contemporary political discourse on social welfare reform that prioritized race and depicted Black women according to the “Welfare Queen” narrative that had been crafted by President Reagan .

  The welfare queen is the defining social stereotype of the Black woman: a lazy, promiscuous, single Black mother living off the dole of society. She poses a threat to the Protestant work ethic that drives America and the American Dream of social advancement and acceptability. The welfare queen trope is a complicated social narrative in which race, gender, and class are interlocked. The welfare queen metaphor does not simply embody images of Black women; its broad-ranging scope is deeply embedded in almost every facet of our social and political discourse. The episodes recounted here of Vanessa Williams , Anita Hill , Carol Moseley Braun, Lani Guinier , and Joycelyn Elders were all heavily influenced by the welfare queen narrative . Noted legal scholar Lani Guinier was branded a “Quota Queen” by conservative political groups in their effort to block her nomination to a top position in the Justice Department. As Patricia Williams observed, “‘Quota Queen’ evoked images of welfare queens and other moochers who rise to undeserved heights, complaining unwarrantedly all the way. Lani Guinier , the complex human with a distinguished history, was reduced to a far-left ‘element’….”

  The queen trope was perpetuated by the media. The day after Professor Guinier was nominated to the subcabinet post, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Clint Bolick, the litigation director of the right-wing organization, The Institute for Justice. Bolick’s piece was titled “BILL CLINTON’S QUOTA QUEENS,” of which Guinier was one. Bolick’s piece—and most articles in the media—failed to give Guinier the opportunity to contest the dominant narrative . In fact, Guinier was effectively silenced until five years are her retracted nomination, when she wrote her own book.

  In her memoir, Guinier addressed the pervasiveness and the problem of the quota queen trope, observingThough “Quota Queen” was coined in the plural the day after the formal nomination, the term was quickly used to target me alone. After all, as a law professor I was the only one with a paper trail. Many of my ideas were complex and thus easily distorted through sound bites. In my law review articles, I expressed reservations about unfettered majority rule – Madison’s majority tyranny – and about the need sometimes to disaggregate the majority in order to ensure fair representation for all substantial minorities. Some columnists who attacked me praised remarkably similar ideas, but in a different context. George Will for example, had opined in a newspaper column: ‘The Framers also understood that stable, tyrannical majorities can best be prevented by the multiplication of minority interests, so the majority at any moment will be just a transitory coalition of minorities.’ The difference was that what I used to illustrate my academic point about the limitations of winner-take-all majority rule was not, as it was in George Will’s example, the minority of well-to-do landlords in New York City. I wrote instead about the political exclusion of the Black minority in many local county and municipal governing bodies in the United States.

  Guinier traced the roots of the welfare queen image right back to their origins, adding,I became Reagan’s welfare queen tooling around the neighborhood in her Cadillac, mocking the hard work of others and the hard labor undertaken to produce this Democratic system. The image of the undeserving poor was transformed into the image of the undeserving voter who would benefit by me – their champion – manipulating the rules to distort democracy in favor of my chosen few. I was not only asking for what they didn’t deserve or hadn’t earned. I was willing to corrupt the entire democratic system to get it for them.

  During May and June 1993, I was displayed in cartoon and narrative in more than 330 articles as a “Quota Queen.” Newsweek magazine used the term in a headline, CROWNING A QUOTA QUEEN?, to signal a story in which the term ‘welfare ’ was also featured prominently. The subtext was that of the welfare mother, with one hand outstretched palm-up, the other resting saucily on her hip as if to say, ‘I dare you not to give me what is mine, mine, mine.’ It no longer mattered that I had not even written on welfare . No one cared that, in fact, I did not believe in quotas . That I was a democratic idealist became irrelevant. No one bothered to try to understand my vision of dispersed and shared power.

  Guinier wrote astutely and incisively about the way in which she was turned into a queen by the media, but she was not the only Black woman who suffered that fate. Similarly, Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was unceremoniously marked a “Condom Queen” as a result of her position in which she advocated the availability of condoms in public schools as a public health strategy for halting the spread of HIV/AIDS. What made Elders’ position untenable, of course, and which ultimately led to her resignation, was that Elders’ advocacy of condoms (as opposed to the less realistic strategy of advocating abstinence) was sexually evocative, setting her up as a
sex queen, who is not, after all, unrelated to the welfare queen. Rather than understand Elders’ position as a realistic and potentially useful manipulation of the erotic, as articulated by Audre Lorde in her essay, “Uses of the Erotic,” Elders was lambasted for her alleged call for adolescent sexual promiscuity and, indeed, promiscuity.

  Elders recognized the power of the erotic. She spoke out publicly in 1993–1994 about issues that the Black women of Combahee spoke about behind closed doors 15 years earlier. She was also unafraid to publicly address the racialized and sexualized aspects of public health that prevented optimal well-being for all Americans and minorities in particular. In a speech at the annual meeting of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, representing about 4000 clinics, Elders said:The Medicaid system must have been developed by a White male slave owner. It pays for you to be pregnant and have a baby, but it won’t pay for family planning…. [I]t fails to provide services to poor women to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and this failure contributes to poverty, ignorance and enslavement. White male slave owners wanted a lot of healthy slaves, people to work. We don’t need slaves anymore. We need healthy, educated, motivated children with hope. We need to really invest in family planning.

  After people took offense at her remarks, Elders offered a supplementary explanation:What I meant was, if you’re poor and ignorant, with a child, you’re a slave. Meaning that you are never going to get out of it. These women are in bondage to a kind of slavery that the 13th Amendment just didn’t deal with. The old master provided food, clothing, and health care to slaves because he wanted them to get up and go to work in the morning. And so on welfare you get food, clothing, and shelter – you get survival, but you can’t really do anything else. You can’t control your life.

  The following comments led to her being called the “condom queen”:Condoms are not the government’s solution to the teenage pregnancy crisis. But we want to make condoms available to those who choose to be sexually active. I am not in the opinion that just because you have a condom, you are going to go out and have sex. There is not a person in this room that does not have car insurance, but you’re not going to go out and have a wreck because of it.

  When asked at a press conference in 1987, when she was chosen to head the Arkansas Health Department, whether she would pursue the distribution of condoms in school-based clinics as a means of reducing teenage pregnancy, she replied, “Well, we’re not going to put them on their lunch trays, but yes.” Asked about being called the “condom queen,” Elders replied, “If I thought it would help persuade young people to protect themselves, I’d wear a crown with a condom on it.” Elders’ remarks were dramatic, stirring controversy and alienating a more conservative public afraid to talk openly about sexuality from her views, even if they shared them. Finally, it was the Surgeon General’s suggestion that the topic of masturbation be included in the public school curriculum about sexuality that led to her ultimate downfall in the Clinton administration. President Clinton misconstrued Elders’s comments on masturbation information, saying that she called for instruction. On December 9, 1994, Clinton asked her to resign after Elders answered a physician’s question at a professional meeting. She had said that teaching the facts about masturbation might well be included in educating schoolchildren about their sexuality. Clinton’s response was, “Well, I’m sorry but we can’t just have any more of this and I want your resignation by 2:30 P.M.” An ousted official normally is permitted to maintain the illusion that she has voluntarily stepped aside, and there is a polite exchange of letters. The White House took pains to make clear that Clinton had demanded that Elders leave.

  Elders was in the unique position of being a Black woman in a presidential post like the Kennedy Commission women, but Elders publicly articulated the radical feminist theories espoused by the Combahee women. The PCSW women might argue that Elders was fired because she was Black, and the National Black Feminist Organization might argue that she was fired because she was a Black woman. The women of the Combahee River Collective would have been likely to argue that a far more complex dynamic was at play. Born in poverty, Dr. Joycelyn Elders was an educated, eventually upper-middle-class Black woman who spoke out about the erotic. To understand contemporary Black feminism and Black women’s experiences in politics, one must turn toward the history of Black feminist political groups as discussed earlier in this book.

  As Patricia Williams so aptly concluded: “The use of the term ‘queen’ to describe Dr. Elders , another Black woman ultimately driven from her post in a doggedly-waged smear campaign, highlights the extent to which the connotations of the term demand some explicit consideration” (Egg, 145–146). Finally, one often-ignored element of Clarence Thomas’s testimony before the Senate confirmation committee was his shameful invoking of the welfare queen stereotype in denigrating his sister, Emma Mae Martin, for his own political advantage. Although the welfare queen trope did not hold anywhere near the prominent public position in the 1990s that it did with the Reagan administration , the welfare queen still played a disturbing, significant role within the Clinton administration. Welfare reform was a major theme of Clinton’s electoral message in both 1992 and 1996. In 1992, Clinton’s promotion of welfare reform positioned him as a new, different kind of Democrat not beholden to the traditional Democratic special interests. As Nancy Fraser (1993) noted: “Clinton’s winning electoral strategy involved muting so-called claims of so-called special interests, especially Blacks and organized labor.” Clinton’s positioning away from the “liberal interest groups” such as minorities, feminists, and labor was a blatant attempt to appeal to the disenchanted working-class and white ethnic groups that had defected from the Democratic Party as part of the backlash against liberalism in past presidential elections. By publicly reprimanding Black leaders, including Jesse Jackson , Clinton was attempting to market himself as a “new Democrat” who was indeed “independent” from and not bound to these liberal special interests.

  The use of welfare as a wedge issue was a crucial element in this strategy. As a result of the political restructuring of social welfare discourse, welfare by the 1980s had become a medium beyond public assistance and relief. As Fraser (1993) stated, “During the 1980s in the United States ‘welfare ’ increasingly served as a vehicle for expressing such stresses, while also coding antagonisms of gender, race, and class.” Clinton’s shrewd self-promotion under the “new Democrat” label was an attempt to counter the advantages conservatives had been able to exploit on the racially charged issues involving welfare , poverty , and race. Numerous campaign advertisements in 1992 were aired espousing the Clinton -Gore ticket as a “different kind of Democrat.” One television spot showed Clinton speaking from the governor’s mansion in Arkansas and saying:For so long government has failed us, and one of its worst failures has been welfare . I have a plan to end welfare as we know it – to break the cycle of welfare dependency. We’ll provide education, job training and childcare, but then those who are able to work must go to work, either in the private sector or in the public service. I know it can work. In my state we’ve moved 17,000 people from welfare rolls to payrolls. It’s time to make welfare what it should be – a second chance, not a way of life.

  This strong emphasis on welfare reform by the Clinton -Gore ticket was an attempt to break the Democratic Party’s connection to the current welfare system , which had severely weakened the party’s overall credibility. The liberal silence on a number of these complicated social issues involving race and poverty has been deadly. As Edsall and Edsall stated:In political terms, such a fundamental omission from the social policy debate by liberals has opened the door for conservatives to profit by focusing public attention on morality-laden ‘values’ issues – issues running the gamut from the lack of labor-force participation in the ghetto, to sexual promiscuity, to drug abuse, to teen pregnancy, to crime and so on.39

  Clintonism can be seen as an attempt to address this omission from social policy by
Democrats, but as Fraser noted: “Welfare reform a la Clinton continues to target and stigmatize the poor.”

  Clinton’s utilization of welfare reform to distinguish his “new Democrat” credentials also exposed his acceptance of the conservatives’ negative construction of welfare and welfare recipients and allowed the President himself to endorse and perpetuate, albeit indirectly, the welfare queen narrative . The strong emphasis on punitive measures such as time limits and strict work requirements within the PROWRA illustrates the measure’s focus on the behavior of recipients, rather than structural explanations, as the fundamental cause for welfare dependency and poverty . The popularity of work requirements “implies that recipients are shirkers who stay on the rolls longer than necessary in order to avoid work” (ibid.). Additionally, the Clinton slogan “welfare should be a second chance, not a way of life” implies that there was strong misuse and abuse of the system by recipients. The “second chance” phrase also seemed to hark back to the original, idealistic, ideological basis of poor relief, which relied heavily upon the distinction between the legitimate, deserving poor and illegitimate, non-deserving poor. The second chance language also simplistically reduces the plight of welfare recipients to “chance” opportunities in life. Additionally, it implies that AFDC recipients already had, and blown, their first chance.

  Furthermore , Clinton’s espousal of welfare reform maintained the distinction between social entitlement and obligation, with Social Security and Medicare falling in the former category, while AFDC, food stamps, and Social Security Insurance (SSI) fall in the latter. The maintenance of the dichotomy between “good” social insurance (i.e., universal welfare programs that are not typically designated as “welfare”) versus the means-tested “bad” welfare programs further stigmatizes the welfare recipients as undeserving, while social insurance recipients are deserving. As Fraser and Gordon noted: “Such programs were constructed to create the misleading appearance that beneficiaries merely got back what they put in.” For all Clinton’s talk about “welfare reform ,” his administrative actions continued the two-tier welfare system that has been dominant within American social and political landscape since the Social Security Act of 1935. As Fraser commented: “Campaign promises to ‘end welfare as we know it’ never contemplated eliminating the division between social insurance and public assistance.”